• Aaron Lu's avatar
    thp: reduce usage of huge zero page's atomic counter · 6fcb52a5
    Aaron Lu authored
    The global zero page is used to satisfy an anonymous read fault.  If
    THP(Transparent HugePage) is enabled then the global huge zero page is
    used.  The global huge zero page uses an atomic counter for reference
    counting and is allocated/freed dynamically according to its counter
    value.
    
    CPU time spent on that counter will greatly increase if there are a lot
    of processes doing anonymous read faults.  This patch proposes a way to
    reduce the access to the global counter so that the CPU load can be
    reduced accordingly.
    
    To do this, a new flag of the mm_struct is introduced:
    MMF_USED_HUGE_ZERO_PAGE.  With this flag, the process only need to touch
    the global counter in two cases:
    
     1 The first time it uses the global huge zero page;
     2 The time when mm_user of its mm_struct reaches zero.
    
    Note that right now, the huge zero page is eligible to be freed as soon
    as its last use goes away.  With this patch, the page will not be
    eligible to be freed until the exit ...
    6fcb52a5
swap.c 27 KB